Bangkok Dangerous

Bangkok Dangerous, by the Pang Brothers, is a superb gangster film about a deaf-mute hitman. The story is resolutely lowbrow and generic: violent, sentimental, and sententious. The narrative drifts for about half the movie, and then powerfully coalesces into a revenge plot. The music is pounding, unsubtle, and relentless. Much of the story is conveyed without dialog, and the visuals are amazing, filled with jerkily moving handheld camera, extreme closeups, jump cuts, deliberately mismatched shots, affective montages, abstract use of (grimy and murky) color, scenes shrouded in darkness, and unexpected shifts of perspective (one of my favorites was a shot from the POV of a gecko standing upside down on the ceiling). The Pangs’ stylization is as extreme as John Woo’s, but going in totally the opposite direction: where Woo is gorgeously poetic, with precisely articulated violence and an elegant sense of melancholy, the Pangs are like down ‘n’ dirty grunge rockers, mixing emotional rawness with an unexpected (but still raw) tenderness and vulnerability.

Bangkok Dangerous, by the Pang Brothers, is a superb gangster film about a deaf-mute hitman. The story is resolutely lowbrow and generic: violent, sentimental, and sententious. The narrative drifts for about half the movie, and then powerfully coalesces into a revenge plot. The music is pounding, unsubtle, and relentless. Much of the story is conveyed without dialog, and the visuals are amazing, filled with jerkily moving handheld camera, extreme closeups, jump cuts, deliberately mismatched shots, affective montages, abstract use of (grimy and murky) color, scenes shrouded in darkness, and unexpected shifts of perspective (one of my favorites was a shot from the POV of a gecko standing upside down on the ceiling). The Pangs’ stylization is as extreme as John Woo’s, but going in totally the opposite direction: where Woo is gorgeously poetic, with precisely articulated violence and an elegant sense of melancholy, the Pangs are like down ‘n’ dirty grunge rockers, mixing emotional rawness with an unexpected (but still raw) tenderness and vulnerability.